A stained sock is affixed to a wall with duct tape. An electronic
keyboard with headphones attached sits up against another wall. A
video projection shows a cartoon cat endlessly circling in the corner
of one room. In alternative galleries, art can consist of borrowings
from pop culture and casually installed found objects, like these
pieces at Seven Three Split. Started in 2000 by three art students
and a boyfriend, its name was conceived one night while two of them
were bowling; it's now run by one of the founders, Tim Fleming, who
lives upstairs. Paying the rent from his income as a Web designer,
he doesn't have to sell anything to stay in business, the place is
open only on Saturdays, and he doesn't necessarily have shows year-round.
The artists are often recent art-school graduates; Scott Roberts
and José Lerma, who are friends, both received MFAs in 2000 from
the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Lerma was born in Spain in 1971 and grew up in Puerto Rico, where
he lives today. He writes that his Sock With Cum Stain refers to "Aktionist
art from Vienna and plenty of 60s body-fluid art, but it is really
about being 14." It's also obnoxiously confrontational, though
I enjoyed the apparent macho joke in the checklist that identifies
it as one of an "edition of 5." (Lerma described an earlier
piece, documented in a book at the gallery, as "a sock that
can stand erect using my own sperm as a binder.") If Sock With
Cum Stain were characteristic of this show of six works by Lerma
and five by Roberts, it might justify a rant against narcissistic
art students. Fortunately, most of Lerma's other pieces are engaging
(though an outdoor installation of snow dyed yellow has melted),
and two of Roberts's three video installations are superb.

Lerma's D Minor Chord is a good example of how the alternative-gallery
antiaesthetic can prove interesting. Six keys on the keyboard against
the wall have been fastened down with duct tape, so that two D-minor
triads are playing continuously. You can hear the single pulsating
chord only on the headphones. This piece flirts with a Cagean boundary
between art and nonart: the assertive drone references trance music,
while the casual look of the piece suggests that art can be found
in everyday objects. Lerma's wall drawing, Wanted to Be Ace but They
Made Me Be Paul Stanley, consists of a dark gray star with an eyelike
white shape in the middle, drawn using mud found in a gutter across
the street; beneath it, near the floor, is a single curvy line of
red lipstick. Using "nonartistic" materials, the artist
nevertheless creates a dynamic composition.

Lerma's Paint Removed From Cabinet and Transferred to Wall is unexpectedly
lovely, combining a battered metal cabinet of Fleming's with a large
wall painting. The back of the cabinet, from which Lerma removed
the paint, faces the viewer; the entire wall behind it displays pale
blue, almost ghostly horizontal brush strokes with paint dripping
down, hinting at a brick surface as rough as the cabinet. The piece
makes a statement about working with minimal, easily accessible materials
and mixes assertiveness--the weighty cabinet, the large wall painting--with
transience: the painting is not only impermanent by definition but
looks temporary. Using inexpensive or free materials--the keyboard
in D Minor Chord is on loan--Lerma makes a social statement as well
as an aesthetic one.

Scott Roberts's three video installations reference
pop culture without either smug irony or excessive worshipfulness.
In Devil Cat, a black-and-white
character modeled on Felix the Cat repeatedly tromps in a circle
in a gallery corner, his image projected so that it's divided between
the floor and two walls. Roberts created the cat using 3-D modeling
software--and when you view it from near the projector, it's undistorted
and fully three-dimensional. No one would mistake this for a real
cat, but the way it turns about in space gives it an almost transcendent
realism.

Roberts, who lives in Evanston, was born in Milwaukee in
1965. As a child he loved cartoons and comics, and in grad school
the films
of Andy Warhol made him aware of the medium's nonnarrative possibilities;
of these pieces he says, "Nothing happens, but there is time
in them." Limbo shows four pairs of cartoon eyes in a dark room,
shifting or blinking slightly at different times and in different
ways. Creating a total environment and focusing attention on tiny
but captivating movements, Limbo is at once goofy and spooky.

The best of the three is Lucky, a stunning replica of a Lucky Charms
cereal box created through video projection on a blank cardboard
form. The projector sits on one pedestal and the box on another;
Roberts used 3-D software to create undistorted pictures and texts
on the three sides of the box facing the projector. (Like Liza Lou,
who constructs consumer objects--even an entire kitchen--out of colored
beads, Roberts redeems the ordinary through the luminosity of his
materials.) The image on Roberts's box also moves: a spoon repeatedly
scoops cereal out of a bowl, and a leprechaun eats right out of a
box. Roberts shot both sequences (playing the leprechaun himself),
while the product information comes from scans of an actual box.

Not surprisingly, Roberts identifies animated cereal commercials,
in which the product's mascot comes to life, as an artistic influence.
Here the piece's sculptural presence, its repeating, "timeless" moving
images, and Roberts's manipulation of them to make the perspective
of each surface look normal give his cereal box a hyperreal, almost
eternal quality. That consumer products have become the icons of
our age is a commonplace, but Roberts gives this idea a disturbing
resonance.